| Kringress |
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I posted most of this on the Facebook page, but have done some editing to hopefully make my concerns better
My impressions so far in Three Parts with the forth part being placed to go over the design of the rule book.
1. Character creation and Advancement makes blah characters.
After creating characters for PF2 and doing level ups all characters look the same. There is no room in the character creation process for any real uniqueness. To give an example:
At the end of character creation you will usually have 18, 16, 12, 12, 10, 10. This is due to the rule on page 18 on ability boosts “When you apply multiple ability boosts at the same time. You must apply each one to a different score.” With this you will have these types of scores:
Prime Stat: Secondary Stat, Save, Save, INT, CHA.
Level 1: 18, 16, 12, 12, 10, 10
Level 5: 19, 18, 14, 14, 10, 10
Level 10: 20, 19, 16, 16, 10, 10
Level 15: 21, 20, 18, 16, 12, 10
Level 20: 22, 20, 18, 18, 14, 12
Typical Dwarf Cleric
STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA
Level 1: 12 12 12 10 18 14
Level 5: 12 14 14 10 19 16
Level 10: 12 16 16 10 20 18
Level 15: 14 16 18 12 21 18
Level 20: 16 18 18 14 22 18
You will have at 20th level 4-6 18’s and there is no way of avoiding that. All your characters will have these stats. Blah, blah, blah. There is no variety, no creativity, no fun. This is also a big problem with Starfinder.
My proposed fix:
Change the 4 individual boosts to 8 points that let me put those points where I want them, and then change the level increases from +2 per stat under 18 to +2 per stat under 14 and anything above a 14 is +1. This should keep the base about the same but the increases will be vastly different.
Part II of Character Creation
Ancestry, Background, Class:
I LIKE IT.
Ancestry, by putting in feats you get to create a semi unique person that has things that the will do differently than anyone else. The only advice I can give here is to keep all the races at the same point buy system and have different feats that they can take.
Background, having a Lore and a Skill that starts at 1st level that people having a day job check on is great.
Class, is a good grouping of skills and feats that define those classes. Individual feats and class issues will need to be addressed, but in general the only big problem is with the casters.
First. having Expert, Master, and Legendary all jammed together at level 12, 16, 19. This would be better for all if they were spread out such as 6, 12, 19. This allows for better to hits and saves though the entire progression getting closer to a 50% to hit and to save.
Second, go to a 1, 2, 3 progression for spells and bring back the casting stat bonus spells. This will smooth casting progression and with the casting stat boost you will end most of the gripes from people who want to play casters. This way you get rid of the last 3 levels of stagnation.
Third, have fun.
Part III of Character Creation, The Final Chapter:
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Good: General Feats. Nicely grouped, well placed and thought out. I may have a problem with a couple of the feats, but overall everything here looks very good.
The Bad: Skills. The grouping and consolidation of skills are good, along with what you can do trained and untrained. The very bad part is the automatic increases per level weather or not you are trained in them.
As an example, there is no way in heck that I am going to be able to compete with a trained person in any field that they are trained in unless I get lucky. Can I be trained in that field, yes. But will I know as much as an expert, master, or legend? Probably not.
Here is my proposed fix:
1. Unless you are trained in the skill you get a D20 – 2 + your skill modifier. This is no matter your level, the best you can get is an 18+modifier.
2. Bring back the skill points. As written you have to increase all the skills every level. Changing to Skill Points is not hard and helps keep characters unique. This will allow for greater role play opportunities and keep level bloat down.
3. Use the skill boosts to add Expert, Master and Legendary for the bonuses, and maybe additional things that you can do. This will give you 9 increases with maybe 3 skills in Legendary status.
4. Lore with the fixes above will be much better because you will have to train in a lore to be able to fully understand it.
The good part here is the Critical Failure, keep that it will make people who don’t have a reason to roll not roll.
The Ugly:
Whoever did the equipment section needs to re-look at this entire section. This is a solution is search of a problem. Go back to the weight system, it is better and cleaner because you still have to do the addition. Lets start with Armor, then weapons and finally gear.
Armor: All armor should have at least 1 bulk, (just the weight and how much sweat they generate), and remove the fragile and clumsy qualities from the armor. All of the metal armor can have the noisy quality. Why buy Full Plate as written? It costs more than Half Plate and is worse in all respects. You could have just imported the 1E armor, and added TAC to the armor.
Weapons: Going from one handed to two handed should just increase 1 dice, a D6 to D8, D8 to D10, etc. this should be changed in order to distinguish from 2 handed designed weapons. And give Short, Long, Bastard, and Great Swords versatile P/S.
Now to the worst section. Gear. This section is so bad there are no words to describe it. Personally I would just cut and paste the gear from the Core Rule book with the removal of the Alchemical section.
To show how bad this is, an 8 Str Halfling can carry 19 backpacks (each backpack is 1L). Each Backpack holds 49 backpacks (4 Bulk or 49L and 9-), with each backpack holding 499 pints of oil (1 – per pint, 10 – per L) in them, or about 24,460 pounds per backpack. Or at full load 464,740 pounds, or ~ 58,000 gallons, or about 6 tanker trailers of liquid. This does not include what can be done with belt pouches. But I read that the GMs will check it and enforce it. Yeah uh huh, pull the other one it has bells on. Some GMs will, but a lot will not even look at the sheet.
I can understand trying to change armor and weapons to work within a new system, but most of this is the current Pathfinder system. Paizo should have just put in the old values and added TAC and the minor changes to the weapons. As written the changes to gear are so bad that you need to go back to the old system.